Trychfilod – Hurrah! It’s not a coincidence, they’re ‘cut-beasts’ – because they come in sections (i.e. cutting as in ‘Caesarian section’). And no, that isn’t a pune or play on words – it’s literally the origin of ‘insect’, although it only dawned on me when I realised that the Greek (entomo, as in ‘entomology’) also meant ‘in slices’ (like an ‘atom’ originally being something that by definition was un-splittable).

And now the odds of me actually remembering the word have slightly increased. If only I could remember why it was theat I wanted to know the Welsh for ‘insect’ the other day…

As a learner, I’ve found Google translate can be helpful and confusing. I typically use Google to help with specific words that can have multiple meanings depending on context. For example, this morning, I wanted to type “Welsh for me” in Cymraeg. My first thought was “Cymraeg am fi.” On second thought it could be “Cymraeg i fi.” Plunked my sentence into Google translate for verification and this was the translation.

I believe their algorithm involves looking at thousands of instances of Welsh text and then trying to use context to get the best translation. One of the many problems is that many instances of Welsh text are, of course, literary Welsh, so you do end up with some unusual translations combining colloquial, literary and non Welsh.

In terms of documents that are available in both Welsh and English, suitable to be thrown at the algorithms, the overwhelming majority will be official government or quasi-governmental documents since these are the only institutions that will be obliged to operate bilingually and that will produce literature in the required quantity. Aside from quoted text, the bias will lean heavily towards the formal register.